


In the Shadow of the Moon

by rabbit_moon_wish_me_luck



Category: Naruto
Genre: Horror, How Do I Tag, OCs will be minor and for plot reasons, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements, elements from the works of Junji Ito
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26226379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_moon_wish_me_luck/pseuds/rabbit_moon_wish_me_luck
Summary: When Yamanaka Inoichi is asked to consult on a troubling case at the hospital, he doesn’t expect the path it will take him down as he starts to investigate strange happenings in the villages around Konoha.
Kudos: 2





	In the Shadow of the Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The adventure begins!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! This is my very first fanfic and I’m really excited to share it with you. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from the works of Junji Ito and the Cthulhu mythos. I’ve pulled a lot of monsters/supernatural phenomena from Ito’s work, but not quite enough to make this a real crossover. Kind of a fusion? You don’t need to know anything about his works though! I’ll put the works I drew from at the end of each chapter for those interested. Hope you enjoy!

The hospital halls are exhausting at this hour, all dull white walls and too-bright overhead lighting. The large window at the end of the corridor acts as a mirror, making the white walls stretch impossibly long into the dark sky beyond.

Inoichi’s sandals scuff every so often as he drags his feet behind the middle aged doctor guiding him to a room halfway down the hall. She pulls the clipboard off the door and checks it briefly before handing it to him. Before he can remark that it’s entirely blank, she executes a fast hand sign and the pages before him fill with ink, symptoms and test results and labs sprawling across the paper as fast as he can read.

“Nice,” he hums.

“She’s asleep now. First time in a few days,” she informs him as he scans through the thick chart. 

His brow furrows. There is nothing in the documents he is looking at that warrant his particular skill set. “Why am I here?” He asks bluntly. “As far as my limited experience goes, everything here looks normal and I don’t see why this couldn’t have waited until I had gotten some sleep myself.”  
She frowned a bit at his snippyness, but didn’t comment. T&I had been particularly busy in the past months since the simultaneous increase in tensions with Iwa and the emergence of a new lead on the Nine-Tails’ attack, and his subsequent long hours were no secret to anyone in the shinobi community. Despite most suspicion having been placed squarely on the Uchiha, there were still other possibilities that had to be explored. Between his sometimes days-long shifts with the particularly difficult detainees and his three-year-old who was only just beginning to sleep through the night on her own, he was lucky to average a few hours of solid sleep every couple days. _Thank the Sage for caffeine and chakra pills_.

“I apologize for adding extra work. We thought it might be best - it _is_ best -” she corrected herself, “- that you be able to see the symptoms directly.” In the hallway’s harsh fluorescent lights, the gray at her temples stands out sharply from the rest of her dark hair, and she suddenly looks much more worn out than she had a moment ago. Her report is steady regardless. “This patient came in one month ago complaining of ‘long dreams’.”

“I saw that in the chart,” he interjects. “I apologize, but I’m not familiar with that condition.”

She runs a hand through her ponytail tiredly. “Neither is anyone here. From what she says, it’s exactly what it sounds like - she goes to sleep and her dreams feel like they last longer than a night.”

“That is how many dreams feel.”

“A lot longer.” She snaps, but softens again when he looks sheepish. “When she got here, she said they were lasting a few weeks each, now she says every dream lasts a year or more. She’s losing track of reality, she says. Finds it hard to remember things that happened just yesterday.”

Inoichi brushes his hair from his eyes absently; it was getting long, he’d need to remember to cut his bangs soon. “And you hope I can provide an outside opinion on these dreams - a more objective sense of their length?”

The doctor smiles slightly and nods. “Yes, ideally.” Her smile drops and she cocks her head, reminding him slightly of his oldest sister. He shakes himself out of that train of thought quickly. Now is not the time. “That is something you can do, right? I’m sorry, but I am not well versed in how your family’s jutsu works.”

He smiles back. “No need to be sorry, that is how we prefer to keep it.” Flipping to the next page of the chart to look at a set of blood tests he didn’t understand, he adds, “And, yes, I should be able to see if the dreams have the normal amount of time dilation. With a certain margin of error.”

“I understand. Dreams are tricky, yeah?”

“Yeah.” He shoots a look at the clock on the wall across from the door. 01:10. “Should we get started?”

“Of course.” She launches into a more in depth report immediately. “The patient is Tanaka Tsubame, a 31-year-old female civilian from a farming village two hours south of the edge of the Shodaime’s forest. She was admitted here one month ago, but she reports having these symptoms starting one and a half months ago.” Her gaze wanders from Inoichi to a spot somewhere above his left shoulder. “As mentioned, each night feels to her like a year. As such, she struggles to remember things that happened the day before since, for her, they took place a year ago.” The doctor’s - Inoichi wished he was rested enough to remember her name - gaze suddenly locked on his again, far more sharply than he was ready for at this hour. “She can’t remember things that happened last week at all, since to her those memories are more than a decade old. I trust you see why this is a problem?”

Inoichi frowns at that. “So the feelings and memories of the dream don’t fade upon waking?”

“No.” The doctor grimaces at that thought. “On our end, we’ve been monitoring her and have determined that she has only one REM cycle per night, starting exactly one-hundred-eighty minutes after she falls asleep and lasting exactly two minutes.”

Inoichi feels his eyebrows crawling up his forehead. “That’s, um, worrying?”

“Very. It’s extremely unusual. This two minute period is when she is dreaming. The rest of the night she experiences normal sleep cycles, with the exception of entering the REM stage at any other point.”

He nods with an expression of slightly more understanding than he feels.

Sighing once more, she glanced up and down the hall, almost subconsciously, before pushing open the door and motioning him to follow. Inside, blackout curtains are drawn over the windows on the far wall. Dim yellow lights glow on all four walls from sockets near the dull linoleum flooring. The temperature is significantly lower in here than in the hallway and Inoichi shivers immediately. A single bed, surrounded by machines taller than the doctor now fussing with them, is pushed up against the middle of the wall to the left of the door. He steps closer to the bed, looking for the patient under the carpet of tubes and wires and feels his breath freeze in his chest.

The figure on the bed barely looks human, her lumpy, bulbous forehead protruding over eye sockets so deep and hollow he wonders for a moment if the sockets are empty entirely. A recessed, skull-like nose sits between sunken, sallow cheeks. Her skin is so cracked and dry he briefly fears that it will crumble away if she were touched.

“The state she’s in,” he begins delicately, eyes unable to leave the peeling lips drawn back over receding gums and jagged teeth, “was she like this when she was admitted?”

The doctor eyes him carefully as she answers, “No.”

“It’s because of her dream condition?”

“As far as we know.”

He shudders. “What caused this? A jutsu?”

“She’s not a shinobi, just a farmer, and we can find no chakra disturbances. As far as medical science is concerned, apart from the abnormal REM cycle, she is experiencing normal sleep.”

Steeling himself against the rising unease in his chest, he turns to the doctor. “When do you want me to start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, the first chapter is a little short, but the next one should be longer and up within the week. Please let me know what you think and what I could improve!
> 
> The ‘long dreams’ referenced are basically the same as in Ito’s story “Long Dream”, which is definitely worth a look.


End file.
